On children

It has been awhile.

I was walking past a Boys and Girls club today and I saw a bunch of large paintings in the window that were done in a very childish style, but couldn’t have been painted by a child. It made me think that it is probably adults that like childish painting more than kids actually like to paint them. Do kids actually like to do art? I know kids are forced/expected to do art from the very get go, but I suspect that kids actually don’t have any kind of desire or preference for it one way or another. We have all just been brought up to assume that that is something that kids do; when you go out, bring some crayons so that the kid can have something to do, because kids love art. Is it not that adults love kids’ art, and kids like to do things that get that kind of loving approbation?

Another thing I was thinking: I was walking down the road and I looked down and saw a kid in his yard with a baseball bat and a tennis ball, looking like he was about to toss the ball up and hit it up over the fence into the road. Then he saw me, and ran away and went inside. The kid knew that it is wrong to hit balls into the street. Sometimes people will say that kids don’t really understand the difference between right and wrong, that kids can be so cruel, etc. Kids know that shit is wrong. I remember doing terrible things that I knew were horrible, but I did them anyways.

I have realized later in life that my father subjected me to his flatulence for decades. I smell my own mature flatulence and recognize the smell. I never knew what that smell was all that time.